Courtesy of Kentucky Lantern
FRANKFORT — Some key Republican House lawmakers voiced concerns about Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s proposed “Pre-K for All,” citing potential costs to taxpayers and the effects of the competition on private childcare providers.
Sam Flynn, executive director of the Team Kentucky Pre-K for All Program, told state lawmakers Tuesday that expanding preschool access would provide parents a place for their kids that is safe, educational and that will “prepare those kids for the educational career that they’re going to have.”
Eventually making preschool available to all Kentucky 4-year-olds is one of Beshear’s top priorities, and the state budget enacted this year will be the last before he leaves the governorship in 2027.
Flynn is one of a number of Beshear administration officials making presentations before the legislature’s budget review subcommittees on administration requests to be included in the two-year state budget. The budget filed by House Republicans last month is significantly pared down from Beshear’s proposal and did not include the governor’s request for expanded preschool.
Flynn said among the current options for preschool, Head Start programs provide early childhood education for low-income families while private childcare can have families “paying upwards of 13% on average of their take-home pay on childcare in Kentucky.”
Flynn said the “big gap” in options makes childcare unaffordable or inaccessible for working families. For example, he said, Robertson County and Todd County have a lack of childcare spots or no childcare providers. He said school systems in rural counties have the infrastructure to expand preschool. An advisory committee created by Beshear found last year that Kentucky’s children were not ready for kindergarten and only about 27% of children had access to Pre-K.
But Rep. Josh Bray, R-Mount Vernon, vice chair of the House Appropriations and Revenue Committee, rejected the idea that school districts should serve as child care. He mentioned his kids had been out of school for nine days recently because of the weather while his wife has still had to go to work.
“Pre-K is not childcare. The school system is not childcare,” Bray said. “It’s not a replacement for childcare.”
Flynn responded that the preschool expansion was about kindergarten readiness, pointing to a Legislative Research Commission report from 2018 that examined preschool and kindergarten programs in the state. That report found that kids receiving free or reduced-price lunch were more prepared for kindergarten if they attended preschool.
“The opportunity, because this is a voluntary program, to go to one of those educational environments, is going to drastically improve our kindergarten readiness,” Flynn said.
A couple of lawmakers including Bray also took issue with how the Beshear administration is proposing to fund the expansion, tapping unobligated sports wagering tax revenues housed within what’s known as the Kentucky Permanent Pension Fund.
Lawmakers created that fund in 2016 to help address massive unfunded liabilities with the state’s public pensions. The fund receives appropriations, settlement monies and proceeds from sales of state property and started receiving a portion of tax revenue from sports gambling when the legislature legalized it in 2023.
Flynn said there is about $115 million to $120 million of sports gambling tax revenue “sitting in an account” that could cover the $10 million in expansion startup costs for universal preschool and $40 million of operating costs in fiscal year 2028. About $40 million of new revenue is deposited into the account every year, Flynn said, which is “sufficient” to cover the cost of the program into the future.
Flynn said that tax revenue, while having been placed in the permanent pension fund, is “not actually allocated to any pension program currently.”
“Those monies essentially sit in an account and have not been allocated towards any purpose. We believe this is a meritorious purpose that is going to serve a lot of Kentucky 4-year-olds now and into the future,” Flynn said.
Rep. Kim Banta, R-Fort Mitchell, chair of the Primary and Secondary Education and Workforce Development Budget Review Subcommittee, told Flynn she also had concerns based on feedback she’s received from private childcare providers in her area. Flynn said he’s met with childcare providers and other stakeholders, saying such private providers would be encouraged to partner with school districts to provide preschool services.
Bray also asked about how staffing for the preschool expansion would be managed and warned that school districts would be making future budgetary requests for new buildings.
“If we expand the number of kids in school, there will come budget requests to build new buildings, to build additional classrooms, for additional staffing,” Bray said. “Do you all have any idea or any kind of data on what we may be looking like in 2030, 2031 — or whatever your long runway is — so that we can plan for that into the future?”
Flynn replied that while he couldn’t speak to every school district’s situation, many of them “have already identified classroom space available” for the expansion.
“We’ve already had a significant number say, ‘We can do this right now,’” Flynn said.
Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
